Boston indie music and movie lovers, rejoice! There is a hat trick of music-related documentaries next weekend as part of Independent Film Festival Boston. All three screenings are at the Somerville Theatreat 7:30 pm. The italicized excerpts are from the IFF Boston site, and you can get more info and buy tickets there.
Friday Monday, April 23rd 26th, 7:30 pm, Somerville Theatre
An icon defined by his music’s emotional accessibility and the detached enigma of his public persona, Smith is as quietly compelling in the accounts of his friends and fans as his life and lyrics were….Balancing his darkest depressions and greatest achievements, SEARCHING FOR ELLIOTT SMITH reveals its subject’s kindness, subtle humor, and reserved brilliance, as well as the perfect imperfections of his prolific output—and it testifies to the overwhelming effect his visceral truths had on his closest friends and anonymous admirers alike. [D. Barnum-Swett]
Every real music fan has a favorite band—but it’s a very rare fan who single-handedly attempts to reunite them years after they’ve packed it in. In director Robert Patton Spruill’s DO IT AGAIN, that rare fan is Geoff Edgers, a Boston Globe staff writer and dedicated follower of the Kinks. Edgers was driven to embark on a risky and time-consuming quest to get the Davies brothers and their old bandmates back in the same room to play some songs…. [B. Searles]
…Directors Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara provide us with comfortable, homey access to Merritt and the most important, grounding influence in his life: his decades-long friendship with his chipper musical collaborator Claudia Gonson. On his home turf, in the apartment that has doubled as the studio for the lion’s share of his recordings, Merritt is anything but prickly or uncooperative. He is a reflective, passionate, and even playful artist who is producing many of the great songs of his generation. [SL Frey/K Aikens]
EDIT: Factcheck fail. Dates, times, and venues have been corrected. Thanks to Brad for the heads-up!
Listen up, possums: LGBT themes in popular music did not start with YMCA and end with Katy Perry kissing a girl and liking it. So in honor of Sean Penn’s Oscar win for his portrayal of Harvey Milk, this “Commie, homo-loving” writer proudly presents three retro gay gems from the vault.
First up is Elton Motello‘s 1977 punk treasure “Jet Boy Jet Girl,” written from the point of view of a gay teenager who is essentially the flip side of Katy Perry’s ‘experiment’ – after a brief fling with him, his lover returns to girls. I suspect it doesn’t get a lot of airplay in the United States, since in 1989, Florida station WIOD was fined $10,000 by the FCC for playing it. But it was in regular rotation in the UK and Canada, and has been covered by bands including The Damned.
Next up is a dance hit by John Water’s favorite actor (or -ress), Divine: “You Think You’re A Man.” Released in 1984, it reached #16 on the UK charts and even landed Divine a spot on Top of the Pops. However, it never charted in the US. (seeing a pattern here?)
Finally, Canada’s Rough Trade were a new-wave band who were, as their name implies, unabashedly sexual. Their song “High School Confidential,” made it into the Canadian Top 20, one of the first explicitly lesbian-themed songs to be a Top 40 hit anywhere in the world. And, oh yeah, this was 1981.
A side effect of the rise of digital distribution on the Internet and the concomitant decrease in the influence of traditional media appears to be the rise of bands with ‘fuck’ in their names. Fucked Up, the Toronto-based punk band, got a head start (not surprisingly, given the genre) with their founding in 2001. Fellow Torontonians (andz=z faves) Holy Fuck and Bristol, UK-based Fuck Buttons were both formed in 2004. Even Yo La Tengo has gotten into the four-letter-word act, with a live performance March 2008 as Condo Fucks, and an upcoming album, Fuckbook, under the same pseudonym (although it’s not surprising that Canadian and British bands came first).
So, if you are music geek to any degree, at some point you’ve found yourself saying (or at least thinking) some variation on “I liked them before they were cool.” (“I liked their first album better.” “I saw them play this little club.” The permutations are endless.)
I heard a recent Modest Mouse song the other day, and it made me think about how much more I liked their early stuff, and why that would be. So here’s an argument for why it’s not just musical elitism: The early stuff – the first music that you heard by a given artist – is what you chose. It’s the music that spoke to you, that resonated with you in some way that led you to pluck it from the sounds around it and hold it close to your heart. The later music, on the other hand, is presented to you. (“It’s the new album by X.”) It doesn’t have to elevate itself from the background noise in the same way that the first music that you heard by the artist did. So, while it’s great when you like a band more and more as they release new music, that’s unlikely to be the norm.
In defense of the elitism aspect, though, sometimes artists make conscious decisions to be more accessible, musically or lyrically. For example, in the Dresden Dolls‘ first EP, A is for Accident, the live version of “Coin-Operated Boy,” contains the line, “I can’t even fuck him in the ass.” It was later changed, in their debut self-titled album, to the considerably more radio-friendly “I can’t even take him in the bath.” It’s hard to fault them for this, and I still love the new version, but I do prefer the uncompromised former version.
I’ve been on a roadtrip in the Central Coast of California all this week, and it’s beautiful, but I think I am temperamentally more suited to grey Seattle, icy Cambridge, or even foggy San Francisco. This became particularly apparent to me as I took a look through my music collection for this trio of songs. No sunshine, no surfing, no California dream in sight.
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I was at the Ted Leo concert with someone who was much younger than me, and she didn’t really know who The Waterboys were. With the Clear Channel-ization of commercial radio, the dearth of good independent and alternative stations, and the general decline of radio listening, it occurs to me that we are losing a certain musical continuity. I grew up with Toronto’s The Edge, and it exposed me to a lot of music that came out before I was too young to hear or appreciate it, but was still in occasional rotation. It meant that everything new that I listened to fit into a context of decades of college and indie radio. If you’re mostly listening to bands from their Myspace pages, you might not be getting exposed to these bands or sounds of yesteryear.
So here are three songs that are all lost classics from the 1980s – brilliant, emotionally-moving songs. As well as the Waterboys, here’s Australia’s Hunters and Collectors (a live track is below; you can hear the canonical version in the video above). I heard Squeeze‘s “Tempted” coming out of a car parked on my street a few days ago and it reminded me how much I loved it (thank you, whoever you are!).
In response to my ‘Christmas songs for non-Christmas people,’ guest blogger Scott offered up three finds. The first is “Father Christmas,” by the Kinks, which I immediately recognized as a staple of my local alt-rock station. It’s a heartwarming holiday song about getting a job as a department store Santa Claus and being mugged by a gang of kids. Rilo Kiley‘s ‘Xmas Cake’ and Jenny Owen Youngs‘s “Things We Don’t Need Anymore” are both about how depressing Christmas can be if you don’t feel like your life is going very well. The former is mostly just sad (crying in the eponymous cake) and the latter song is heavily leavened with anger (‘Here’s to wishes that’ll never come true.’)
Scott also sent me a song called “I’m Going to Spend My Christmas With a Dalek,” off an album of Doctor Who related songs, Who Is Dr Who. I got 56 seconds in (1:32 to go) before I had to shut it off. It managed to offend me musically, as a fan of Doctor Who (since when do Daleks have left toes?) and, well, as a human (the faux-childish lisp of the singers – yeesh). I think it would be rather fitting if its perpetrators really do get to spend Christmas with a Dalek, since they are pretty low on the holiday spirit and big on the ‘EX-TER-MIN-ATE!’
I can’t actually bring myself to propagate the song further, sorry. There’s enough horrifying stuff on the Internet without my adding to it.
The Constantines and the Weakerthans are teaming up again to reprise their 2005 Rolling Tundra Revue tour. As the name suggests, they’ll be touring all across Canada, starting in St Johns, Newfoundland in March 2009 and ending with a show in Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory. They won’t be crossing into the US on this tour, but I’ll probably brave the border crossing to catch one of the Vancouver shows in early May.
[embedded YouTube video; if you can’t watch it, click here]
Here are three songs that are frequently construed as love songs, but are really creepy stalker anthems; this follows up on a conversation with Nick in this comment thread.
The video above is for the Freezepop song “Stakeout,” which is actually a stalker song. But really, how creepy could being stalked by Liz Enthusiasm (who also did the cool animation) be?
Incidentally, if you happen to be in the Boston area, Freezepop are playing tonight (Friday, December 12th) at the Middle East Downstairs, along with fellow z=z faves The Bon Savants.
If you have a favorite stalker-slash-love song, please share it in the comments!
Regular readers know that zed equals zee temporarily relocated its headquarters from Boston to Seattle this summer. Well, debcha is back in Boston for the week, and here are some songs commemorating her adopted hometown. First up is a terrific live version of “The Ice of Boston” by the late, lamented Dismemberment Plan. Next up is the Dropkick Murphys doing “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” with lyrics by Woody Guthrie. It’s off their 2005 album The Warrior’s Code, but you may have heard it on the soundtrack to The Departed. Finally, the Dresden Dolls‘ unassumingly titled “The Jeep Song,” from their self-titled first album, is a hilarious and painful tale of a black-Jeep-driving lost love on the streets of Boston.
Knowing the z=z audience, I have no doubt that you all rushed out to see Twilight opening night. Twice. And so, to tide you over until you head back mid-week for a third bite of undead Cedric Diggory, I offer a trio of vampire love songs.
[debcha notes: The above is a fine example of Scott’s famously arid sense of humor. However, if you are a Twilight fan who somehow ended up here, I suggest that you go read this article. Now.]
Stephin Merritt’s “I Have The Moon” is, like most of his work, an exceedingly well-written and composed song. But, as with Tom Waits and Nick Cave, sometimes his…unique vocal sound works for him and sometimes against him. I find that “I Have The Moon” falls into the ‘against’ category. But Brit-pop band Lush steps in to tighten a few of the screws and make the spectral quality of the original yet more ethereal. As an aside, Lush is credited with being one of the first bands in the “shoegazing” genre, and I can’t recommend heartily enough that you check out the striking graph toward the bottom of the linked page. (I can only hope that no one has changed it between my writing and your reading this.)
AA Bondy offers a similar story with “Oh The Vampyre.” But instead of Lush’s reinterpretation of Merritt’s moody indie rock, Bondy edges his already folkier style in the direction of blues. I’m in favor of adding harmonica to anything, but it still surprised me how effectively it ramps up the lament quotient on lyrics that would seem more at home with strings and maybe an oboe.
I’ll come clean—those were the only two songs I had in mind in putting this together. I went looking for a third and pulled up some perfectly mediocre options, like Annie Lennox’s “Love Song For A Vampire” or The Deadbeats’ “Vampire Love” (which is chronically misattributed to The Misfits). Fortunately, my one spark of inspiration—that some clever-clever singer/songwriter must have stumbled upon the song title “Bloodlust”—was well-rewarded. Admittedly, Lauren Shera is undeniably folk minus the ‘rock’ modifier I’d apply to AA Bondy, so this isn’t exactly typical fare for z=z. Also, “Blood Lust” isn’t quite a vampire love song; it’s more of a love song that is vampire-adjacent. Sorry. I like it anyway.
[debcha adds: The photo is of Stephin Merritt, mostly because I couldn’t stomach doing an image search with the keywords ‘vampire’ and ‘love.’]
One of my friends tweeted something about how all bands should have theme songs, along the lines of “Hey Hey We’re the Monkees,” which got me thinking. The pure theme songs that came immediately to mind were “We Are The Pipettes,” and both “Freezepop Forever” and “Parlez-Vous Freezepop?” (the existence of both a French and an English theme song for Freezepop warms my Canadian heart). But surely Hallelujah the Hills’ eponymous fight song should count, and then what about They Might Be Giants?
I’m sure there’s more band songs that I can’t think of offhand. Please feel free to share your favourites in the comments.
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Three songs that namecheck bands, with three different intentions.
The Dead Milkmen had a minor college radio hit in 1987 with their song, “Instant Club Hit (You’ll Dance to Anything),” which lampoons listeners of a number of (iterated) post-punk bands, such as The Communards. The best line in the song is, “I came to drink not to get laid.” (I’ve often thought that it would be useful to have a t-shirt with this line, although I’d probably substitute ‘dance’ for ‘drink.’)
In contrast to “Instant Club Hit,” which ridicules music fans for their taste, LCD Soundsystem‘s first A-side, 2002’s “Losing My Edge,” simultaneously celebrates and mocks obsessive music fans with its iteration of bands and repeated refrain of “I was there…” James Murphy slyly mixes reality in with the hyperbole – “I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City” (probably not, since he was four) is alongside “I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids. I played it at CBGB’s’ (yup). But the best phrase is undeniably the description of “art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties.’
Finally, Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip rail against taking music too seriously in “Thou Shalt Always Kill,” off Angles, which was just released in the US. The best part of this song is definitely the visual-pun-laden video [above]. While the lyrics are self-consciously countercultural and more than a tiny bit preachy, Dan et Scroobius get props for the line, “Thou shalt not question Stephen Fry.” Advocating spelling ‘phoenix’ as ‘pheonix,’ however, is suspect, to say the least.
For the record, The Smiths show up in both “Instant Club Hit” and “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and Public Image Ltd shows up in both “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and “Losing My Edge.”
It’s after Labor Day – the summer is now officially over, culturally if not astronomically. So here’s a set of end-of-summer songs, all with a tinge—or more—of autumnal melancholy.
Between seeing Jarvis Cocker at the Pitchfork Music Festival, and watching the Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett promo for the Olympics, I’ve thinking about the era in the 1990s when the sun never set on the Britpop empire. Led by Blur (above), Oasis, and Pulp, British acts dominated the UK charts with songs about, well, being British. In a conscious rejection of US culture (especially the rise of grunge), 90s Britpop married lyrics focused on the lives of working-class Brits—as exemplified by Pulp’s “Common People”—with anthemic or catchy pop tunes, drawing from British-Invasion-era antecedents like The Kinks. The music was seen as part of the larger “Cool Britannia” cultural movement, kind of a nationalism-lite. In 1997, after 18 straight years of Conservative leadership, the young (well, relatively speaking) Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister with a Labour government, and he allied himself with the music and the scene, as a way of associating himself and Labour with youth and change. That was probably its death knell, and the idea of “Cool Britannia” quickly became trite. In retrospect, of course, that cultural moment appears as a bright spot of peace and optimism before 9/11, the 7/7 subway bombings, and the ongoing aftermath. And its music lives on.
Inspired by a pub trivia question about the Crash Test Dummies song, as well as an NPR story on Superman’s birthplace (no, not Krypton – Cleveland, OH), here are a trio of songs about the Man of Steel. Three plus a bonus, actually – you can choose between Laurie Anderson’s cerebral version of ‘O Superman’ or the dancefloor-electronica M.A.N.D.Y. version.
Three fantasias which have real public radio personalities as the subject. First, Amanda Palmer tells the story of her unrequited crush on Christopher Lydon(pictured above), former host of The Connection on NPR’s Boston affiliate, WBUR. Next, Jonathan Coulton‘s ode to WNYC host Soterios Johnson‘s secret E- and Red Bull-fueled club lifestyle. Finally, Franz Ferdinand fantasize about being interviewed by Terry Wogan, BBC Radio 2’s legendary morning radio show host.
Following up on our previous post, here are three heavy metal covers done right. Arab Strap (pictured above) do a version of “You Shook Me All Night Long” which should erase any memory of Celine Dion’s butchery. And as promised, here’s Emm Gryner’s quiet, piano-based version of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train.” Finally, the Dresden Dolls dusted off Black Sabbath’s 1970 anti-Vietnam-War anthem, “War Pigs,” for their live shows:
Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor
Three terrific songs with “Mr.” in the title. Liars and Clinic, from opposite sides of the Atlantic, are both a little more experimental but still compelling and listenable. The Liars track here, “Mr Your on Fire Mr” is from their first full-length, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top (2001). “Mr. Moonlight” is from Clinic’s brilliant second album, Walking With Thee (2001). In contrast, The National forgo experimentalism in favour of lyricism and emotion, although “Mr. November”, with its chorus of “I won’t fuck us over, I’m Mr. November” is one of the rawest and most intense National songs. The version here is from the Black Sessions, recorded in front of a live audience for a French radio station.
Threesome is a new feature on this blog. As its name suggests, it’s a trio of songs that are related by a common theme (okay, wait, I know that’s not what its name suggests to most of you…). Today’s theme is language, and this post features songs about the Oxford comma, the word ‘underwhelmed’ (which is, in fact, in the OED), and some general linguistic playfulness from UW-Madison via The Box Social.
zed equals zee 